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4 Plebeian Race Relations On September 1, 1699, a young man named Domingo Velasquez, who wished to take holy orders, went to the Mexico City cathedral to locate his baptismal partida. To his embarrassment, he found his record in the register ofcasta baptismals. Protesting that this "was an error by the person who made the said entry," Velasquez qUickly assembled three aged neighbors willing to support his claim to Spanish status. Closely echoing the other two witnesses, Bartolome de Cardenas, an unemployed shoemaker, stated that he had known Velasquez "since he was born and that he also knew his parents, having intimate contact and dealings with them." Cardenas affirmed that all the members of the Velasquez family were "known and taken and commonly reputed" to be Spaniards "without any mixture."l Velasquez's petition was granted just two days after submission.2 How reliable is the data on castas found in parish records? The Velasquez incident hints at some of the complexities underlying the apparently simple act of recording a baptism or marriage. Perhaps the misplacement of his partida was merely a clerical error; but one suspects that the officiating priest deliberately set aside the family's racial claims in favor of his own judgment. As suggested previously, parish books should not be viewed as neutral or objective records but as one forum among many for the contestation and manipulation of racial identity. This is hardly surprising , given the social gulfbetween the participants. On one side stood the priest, perhaps disdainful ofor condescending to his racially "inferior" parishioners; on the other, plebeians who were not necessarily willing to allow the church to define their racial status-or to dictate their social and moral behavior. Plebeians sometimes mocked the symbols, rites, and festivals of the church; they also displayed a rather casual attitude toward the sacrament of marriage. In Mexico City, where females outnumbered males,3 many plebeian women sought sexual satisfaction-and some financial securityin concubinage. Casta illegitimacy rates of over 50 percent in the second halfofthe seventeenth century4 suggest the prevalence ofsuch nonmarital unions, which constituted a primary mechanism for race mixture-above all, for miscegenation between Spanish men and casta women.5 Moreover, 68 Plebeian Race Relations 69 while the authorities occasionally cracked down on "notorious" cases, concubinage enjoyed general social acceptance. Judging from examples of women who bore children before their marriages (sometimes to men other than their husbands), such liaisons did not necessarily bar future matrimony ; plebeians apparently had less regard for female chastity than did the elite.6 Clearly, parish records, as a statistical index to interracial unions, are misleading. Nor is this concern confined to marriages: it would also be a mistake to equate baptisms with births, or burials with deaths. Nevertheless , parish records remain a highly valuable source. One must realize that plebeian attitudes toward the church were complex and ambivalent and certainly did not translate into simple rejection of priestly services.7 Hundreds of castas were baptized, married, and buried every year in Sagrario Metropolitano. Furthermore, these occasions marked very significant moments in the life cycle. Consider, once again, the sacrament of marriage. If many plebeians avoided the altar, those who did choose to wed did not make this decision lightly. Thomas Calvo, in a study of Guadalajaran families in the seventeenth century, noted that marriage had not "lost all value, all prestige: socially it kept its role, it maintained its importance"; it was the means by which men and women publicly assumed a place in the social order.8 As we shall see, casta marriage patterns were hardly random, and they have a good deal to say about plebeian race relations. Indeed, the great value of parish registers is that they provide systematic , continuous data over long periods of time and thus permit the discovery of patterns in the development of Mexico City's racial structure . These records do not tell the entire story, but if carefully employed, they offer a window on a variety of important topics. This chapter will focus on three of them: (1) the level of racial identification in the Sagrario Metropolitano Parish books, which indicates that the racial differentiation demanded by the sistema de castas was becoming increasingly untenable toward the end of the seventeenth century; (2) mortality rates among the castas, which reveal no significant differences between supposedly higher and lower strata in the racial hierarchy; and (3) casta marriage patterns, which point the way to a more sophisticated understanding ofrace relations in urban colonial...

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